Page 31 of The Fire Line

She made the crew weigh themselves, their personal gear, and every piece of equipment they might reasonably take. Eli supplied the camera and audio figures; Priya calculated food, water, and emergency supplies. Jay turned the numbers into a table of possible load distributions.

By evening, he had a legitimate professional reason to knock on Harris Shaw’s door.

This was not the same as manufacturing an intimate conversation. Obviously.

* * *

A knock sounded against Harris’s cabin door after dinner. The lodge lights showed faintly through the cottonwoods, but the path between the buildings had gone dark. His family rarely knocked without opening the door at the same time, and nobody else had much reason to come out there after hours.

The second knock came before Harris decided whether to answer the first.

Navarro stood on the porch with a folder tucked beneath one arm, his dark shirt open at the throat and the sleeves pushed to his elbows. His hair was loose around his face, still slightly damp near the ends. The porch light caught one side of him and left the other in shadow.

“You have a minute?” Jay asked.

Harris stepped aside.

When Jay crossed the threshold, the room seemed to contract around him. It wasn’t that the cabin was especially small. It had been large enough for Harris and Claire, and since the divorce it often felt larger than one person needed. But Navarro occupied rooms differently than most people. His shoulders narrowed the space between the table and counter, and the loose movement of his hands made Harris conscious of every ordinary thing in sight: his jacket slung over a chair, the mug he’d left beside the sink, the pair of boots kicked beneath the table.

Nothing he wouldn’t want anyone seeing. But he was conscious of those things with Navarro there.

Jay glanced over the bookshelves, woodstove, and photograph beside the lamp without making a production of looking. “Priya wants us to confirm the load options for the high-country locations, in case you ever approve them.”

“Ain’t approved the trip.”

“Yeah, well aware. This is so we understand what’s feasible before you hopefully do approve it.” He opened the folder on the table and began thumbing through the pages.

Harris nodded toward the refrigerator. “Beer?”

Jay’s eyebrows rose. “Oh. Uh, sure.”

Harris retrieved two bottles and opened them against the metal edge fixed beneath the counter. When he returned to the table, Jay had taken the chair opposite his and arranged the pages between them. He looked oddly natural there.

Which was irritating.

The equipment had been divided into camera, audio, batteries, personal gear, food, water, and emergency supplies, with totals for several crew configurations. The hard cases had already been replaced by soft waterproof bags. Food and water included a reserve. Even the drone had been listed honestly instead of buried somewhere Harris might miss it.

The riders’ weights appeared beside the gear.

Harris’s attention caught on Jay’s line.

He weighed more than Harris would have guessed. Jay was obviously strong, broad through the shoulders and chest, but his height distributed the full weight of him. Harris looked across the table at his long frame folded into the kitchen chair, one boot hooked around the rung.

The total remained comfortably within range.

Harris checked it again anyway.

He had requested the number because horses had limits. Still, the information became physical the moment he read it: the breadth of Jay’s shoulders, the solid body beneath the shirt, exactly how much of him occupied the room.

Harris had spent enough years loading horses to estimate a man’s weight fairly accurately by looking.

He had never previously felt the need to know exactly how much of Jay Navarro there was.

Harris moved to the next line. “Are these estimates, or did you actually weigh everybody?”

“Eli objected on constitutional grounds, but yeah, we all got on the scale.”

“Personal gear too?”